The week in TV: Save Me; Strike; The Assassination of Gianni Versace, and more

Lennie James is magnificent in his new Sky Atlantic thriller, while JK Rowling’s private detective is on his best form yet

Save Me (Sky Atlantic/Now TV)
Strike (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Civilisations (BBC Two) | iPlayer

Had Save Me been airing weekly on terrestrial television, I suspect it would have garnered the kind of shocked chatter normally accorded the likes of Doctor Foster. You simply itch to see where it will go next, what walls it will climb in its fever, what skeletons will rattle from its closets: had this six-parter been on (say) Channel 4, it would have held a nation agog until April. As is now the way, you can binge in one, though I’d respectfully suggest you don’t, thus risking heartburn from what might well be the finest British drama Sky have yet produced. It rides somewhat against my principles, but I would urge readers to invest, if not in Sky, at least in a Now TV box for the likes of this.

It’s a relatively simple, if bitterly sorry, tale: Nelson “Nelly” Rowe, a ducker and a weaver and a chancer and a fighter and a louse, almost wholly redeemed by his charm, is suddenly arrested for complicity in the disappearance/abduction of his own daughter, whom he has never known. He’s been set up, young Jody lured into a false online chat with someone in the guise of Nelly, who knows his most esoteric personal details: Nelson is in the habit of singing them out during his many lock-ins in the Palm Tree, a south London boozer the likes of which few sadly remain.

It’s grim viewing at times. Only one person dies, but there are long periods of barely suppressed menace, often erupting in sharp angry violence, and there’s a constant, grimmer, backlighting of child grooming. And a near-physically unwatchable “auction” in a snooker hall; I had to stand and busy myself with the kettle. Stephen Graham’s character, Melon, the degrees of whose paedophilia are constantly toyed with in our minds and that of his girfriend, Bernie – is he really searching the dark web as a favour to Nelly, to find Jody; has he truly recanted his urges? – is an astonishingly rounded and subtle creation (and deserves awards). Suranne Jones – for it is she, Doc Foster herself – excels as ex-wife Claire, and even the Palm Tree is almost a character in itself, lairy, swift to anger, swift to forgive: the inhabitants reminiscent of the finest creations from This Is England. Above all, it’s an extraordinary tour de force for Lennie James, who wrote and created and stars: his face is the very study of conflict, humour, pain, burgeoning violence and a desperate need to glean redemption, and he pulls off each facet with powerhouse magnificence.

It’s also a bittersweet paean to the real lives lived around the towers in Deptford: misery, poverty, bongs and squats and squalor undoubtedly, but these are suddenly intercut with random delightful shots – a Buddhist meditating amid the madness, a woman in full burqa carrying a gaudy skateboard, pensioners high-kicking at a bus stop. Anyone would have the right to be seriously ticked off with spoilers, but I reckon I can confidently venture that few dramatic plots this year will pivot so vitally, as this does at the end of the fifth hour, on the phrase “saltfish dumplings”.

One has the tiniest suspicion that, in Strike’s Robin Ellacott, JK Rowling is indulging a bit of wish-fulfilment. She has, of course, all the fame and success she could ever have hoped for, but inside might there be someone who longs to be in her 20s, racing around solving crimes in a battered old Land Rover with a gruff bear of a sexy amputee?

Holliday Grainger, who plays Robin, and Tom Burke as private investigator Cormoran Strike are fast becoming the will-they-won’t-they item de nos jours: the motel scene, filmed from the exterior of their neighbouring windows, was a delicious nod to Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Bridges in The Fabulous Baker Boys. The plots may be loopily impenetrable (though this was the best of the three Strike outings so far) but Cormoran and Robin’s immensely comfortable silences, punctuated by gentle repartee – “Is your leg all right?” “No, it’s been blown off” – contrast savagely with the wet weekend of Robin’s fiance Matthew and his mimsy, entitled, sneaky, paleo-vegan chums. Indeed, just why Robin, after Matthew is exposed as seven kinds of louse, might consider being won over by wheedling apologies and “that Nigel Slater salmon thing you like”, and still be even thinking of the wedding, is becoming the only mystery in town.

A quick word about visuals: the BBC have done a seriously crafty job with the prosthetics and digital remastering: Burke must occasionally, watching this from his sofa, tap downwards to reassure himself that he does, after all, possess two legs. And the titling credits, all classy noir-novel fonts and gorgeous grainy mustards, are the best currently on television.

From the team behind last year’s The People v OJ Simpson, another enthralling slice of American murder. For those who thought (as did I) that it was a bit of a fuss in 1997 over a dead frock-jockey, the nine-part drama The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story will prove a surprisingly necessary corrective. We see, in the anguish of the fans, the power of fashion; and in their desperation to grab a slice of his death, the power of greed. We see another world: a Miami Beach villa of hazy light and splendours that would have shamed Greek gods, and of a jealous, bitter, fantasist serial killer. It’s sharp, mesmerising, and we’ve only just got into the Donatella story, with a wonderfully cast Penélope Cruz.

Civilisations is, as you might suspect given the hagiographic reverence in which its Kenneth Clark predecessor is held at the Beeb, a big and clever and sprawling beast, updated to take into account that whitey didn’t, after all, invent all of art and culture and farming. Mary Beard and David Olusoga, who recently gave us the winning A House Through Time, present future episodes, but this first was Simon Schama at his finest, taking us with anger (about Isis) and wisdom (about art) somehow seamlessly from Picasso back to bison cave-paintings and Mayan catastrophes. A sage, sober, ambitious and very BBC undertaking, and on early signs a triumph. The Beeb might even be forgiven the actionable decision to bump the longed-for third episode of Shetland for some terminally mediocre fifth-round kick-ball replay.

Contributor

Euan Ferguson

The GuardianTramp

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